Consuming the Tropics in the 'Age of the Insect': Imperial Imaginaries of Frontier Ecologies in Spectacular Expositions

By surveying representations of 'exotic' landscapes and 'monstrous' other-than-human creatures of the tropics featured in exhibits of the fin de siecle and early interwar period, including visual displays and descriptive language at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in San Francisco (1915), this project examines tropical frontiers as conceived in the geographical imaginaries of the United States to explore how metropolitan audiences related to those environments encountered at the imperial periphery. Between 1890 and 1920, were the infamously exaggerated characterizations of nineteenth-century spectacle tempered by the advent of twentieth-century cultural and scientific discourses, or were those 'old' caricatures of the frontier re-asserted for audiences through similar appeals? The PPIE event celebrated the 'thirteenth labor of Hercules' (the completion of the Panama Canal) at a time when the US consolidated its administration of Panama, Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Commentators proclaimed that 'the conquest of the Isthmian barrier (Panama) was the conquest of the mosquito.' How were mosquitoes and other creatures vilified? In explicitly naming Panama and the Pacific, the PPIE yoked together spatially distant hinterlands. Does public spectacle in San Francisco have bearing on the ecologies of distant places? Engaging with methods and approaches of critical geography and multispecies history, this project asks what we might learn when considering popular exhibitions at particular moments and particular local places in the context of wider globe-spanning routes and networks - both material and imaginative.